Inquiry About Gender-Specific Translation in Google Cloud Translation API

[Devyanshi]

Dear Google Cloud Support Team,

I am using the Google Cloud Translation API to translate text from English into Hindi, Marathi and other languages. My application requires translations that explicitly represent a female persona, particularly for conversational text. However, the current translations default to male-oriented phrasing in these languages (e.g., "मैं आपकी मदद कर सकता हूँ" instead of "मैं आपकी मदद कर सकती हूँ"). I would like to know:

1. If there is an option to control or specify the gender of the translation output within the API. 

2. If custom training or additional configurations can be applied to address this need effectively.

Your guidance on how best to achieve gender-specific translations for my use case would be greatly appreciated. Looking forward to your response.

Best regards,

Devyanshi

[dawnberdan]

Hi @Devyanshi,

Welcome to Google Cloud Community!

The Google Cloud Translation API is a powerful tool, but it has some limitations when it comes to controlling gender in translations, particularly in languages like Hindi and Marathi. It doesn't allow for explicit specification of gender in the output, so translations may default to masculine forms in gendered languages unless the context clearly indicates otherwise. To achieve gender-specific translations, you can combine post-processing, custom models, and careful input text adjustments. For more information, refer to this documentation on providing gender-specific translations.

To address your questions:

1. The API doesn’t currently allow you to directly select gendered translations (e.g., male vs. female forms).
2. To handle gender-specific translations, you can use AutoML Translation to create a custom model that meets your needs.

Lastly, you can refer to this help link for guidance on how gender is handled in Google Translate.

I hope the above information is helpful.